WD Caviar Green HDDs Suffer from a Critical Design Flaw

ICit2lol said:

Hiyya biggles (expat Sussex here) if you were referring to me with -
Is the clicking from your drive's audible/barely audible? Then yes mate it is the Samsung was recommended for the build as it was good and quiet.

Plus I have six fans running - Nexus "Real Silents" and the drive is way louder than all put together including the PSU one (Corsair HX 650).

So am thinking of fitting a Seagate Barracuda 500GB ST3500413AS as it is quoted to have improved audio characteristics and it's 6bs transfer rate to boot (no pun intended but hey what the heck) at AUD$49 if it is only slightly less noisy I'm ahead..

thanks for the recommendation :)
I think i'll go for a 500GB Barracuda as well then (I do need to store lots of data, but I prefer to have it spread across several 500GB drives rather than one 2TB drive incase one fails.) Yeah, when I built my now dead PC, I was expecting the knackered PSU fan to be the loudest, but the HDD beat it by miles with some very worrying sounds

No mate it was a Seagate Barracuda 500GB ST3500413AS and no I didn't know that the higher data rate is not possible.

Just that I have a 3.0 USB external drive that outstrips the 2.0 ones for backups by a factor of 4 - 8min as opposed to 35 with a 2.0USB ext HDD so naturally as the board supports 6Gbs I thought why not use one?

Thanks Gene one of the other reasons for asking was that the Samsung is brand new in my new build (Gigabyte H67A-UD3H -B3 mobo) and rather noisier than I though it would be.


Anyway replacing it at current prices isn't going to be an issue - a nuisance yes but.., hence my query re data transfer speed.

Yeah mate it isn't so much a hum as like some mad pixie drummig a beat out on the casing if it or like I said one scraping your fngernails along the machine case bottom.

Anyway cheap enough to get another (Seagate) and try it eh?

I wonder if this explains why my WD 1 TB HDD (2009) has "better looking" SMART stats, than my WD 1.5 TB HDD (2010).

I have a desktop and saving a few watts isn't a high priority (unlike a portable computer).

Is there an upper limit or "never park" option?
Can I set the time to anything I like (e.g. 43200)?

Update
You can disable the timer using this command:

wdidle3 /d

You can view the timer status using this command:

wdidle3 /r